News and Reviews from the world of Theatre

★★★★ Seductive but Squalid Prohibition-Era Debauchery

This show’s leading strength is its wonderful choreography, created by its brilliant young director, Drew McOnie who won an Olivier for his work on In the Heights, the hip-hop musical that led to Hamilton. This is followed at a respectable distance by the music, which is too intriguing to call catchy, and yet has a haunting angularity which, I suspect, makes it really grow. As for the plot, it is drawn, somewhat surprisingly, from an epic poem of the same title, and needn’t detain us long. Queenie is a blonde (or ‘Wazza Blonde’ in the title of the opening number) showgirl, bored with life with her sugar daddy co-star, and decides to throw a Wild Party. A bestiary of wild party animals materialises, behaves with bestiality (don’t get me wrong, there’s no actual bestiality, but most other tastes are catered for) and then there is an inevitable bloody aftermath.

Queenie herself is too much a cipher to hold much interest, but there are particular delights and quirks to be found in the other characters: Chief dancer Miss Madelaine True (the remarkably statuesque Tiffany Graves) and her frustrated relationship with the near-comatose Sally; the don’t-wannabe-Jews Gold and Goldberg, and perhaps most of all the ever-present Brothers D’Armano (Genesis Lynca and Gloria Obianyo), slinky cross-dressing twins, who are like a chorus to the main action, always moving in feline synchrony.

This is a mood piece rather than an intricate tale or a moral to convey, but the show very successfully conjures the atmosphere of seductive but squalid Prohibition-era debauchery, and has much to enjoy.